A songwriting workshop with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, the
new stars of old-time country

By Simone Solondz

Rape, death, and tough women left alone to protect their homesteads
have been the stuff of folk music since the first murder ballads were sung.
Gillian Welch and David Rawlings do the tradition proud with their latest
collaboration, Hell among the Yearlings, produced by T Bone Burnett.
If the duo’s debut recording Revival was too heavy for you, you’d
better not spin this one. It’s only for those listeners who enjoy a dip
in the deep, dark holler. The record, named after an old fiddle tune, is
remarkably true to Welch and Rawlings’ spellbinding live performances--almost
nothing is added to their vocal and instrumental interplay. Anchored by
Welch’s rock-solid rhythm playing, Rawlings’ pianistic leads on his 1935
Epiphone archtop are as sweetly dissonant as ever, and his harmonies under
Welch’s straight-ahead delivery bring goose bumps to the flesh.

The duo’s songs are known for their stark, raw simplicity--lyrics boiled
down to their essence to tell tales of hardship, hope, and human frailty.
It’s this kind of writing that captured the attention of Emmylou Harris,
Tim and Mollie O’Brien, and Trisha Yearwood, just a few of the many artists
who have covered Welch and Rawlings’ songs.

The biggest change since Revival is the addition of Welch’s banjo
playing, which she picked up (incredibly) only about a year before Hell
among the Yearlings was recorded. Her frailing on "The Devil Had a
Hold of Me," "One Morning," "Winter’s Come and Gone," and "Rock of Ages"
hits the mark again and again. Welch and Rawlings shared their experiences
recording the new album and got into the nitty-gritty of how they compose
and arrange together in a preconcert workshop at the Acoustic Guitar Festival
last August.

IN SEARCH OF TRANSPARENCY

One of the first songs Welch wrote on banjo was "Winter’s Come and Gone,"
although it later evolved into a two-guitar arrangement. The song is a
good example of how she works with Rawlings. "Dave is really good with
plot development and is a really good editor," she said. "After I get as
far as I can with the initial inspiration--spitting out as much as I possibly
can--then we start working on it together. The grueling part is filling
in the gaps.

"Other genres might be more cerebral, and people might appreciate clever
wordplay or a rhyme. But in the more traditional genre we work in, I think
it’s a mistake if anyone’s aware of me as a writer. I just want them to
hear the story and the character and the emotion. The aesthetic of transparency
is what we deal with all the time."

Both partners insist that they’re not trying to sound old-fashioned
or "timeless." "Hopefully the stuff sounds contemporary," Welch said, "because
that’s what it is. These stories have never been told before, and these
words have never been strung together before."

"A lot of times, the idea is so small," Rawlings added. "She’ll have
a really great verse, but we’ll bang our heads against the wall for a while
and nothing will follow it up. Sometimes what we find is that the first
two lines of the [original] four-line verse are the first two lines of
the song, and the last two are the last two lines of the song. And then
you’ve got to stretch it and fill in the middle."

The addition of the banjo deeply affected the songs written for Hell
among the Yearlings. Welch believes that the banjo adds a nice texture
but provides its own set of challenges. "The banjo songs tend to be more
repetitive," she said, "because the rhythm is so incessant and also because
I’m not really worrying about chord changes as much. It’s more modal, and
I use the drone string a lot. I just play the melody and that’s it. It’s
a little bit hypnotic."

Rawlings pointed out that all of the songs Welch wrote on banjo encompass
a series of melodically identical verses rather than the verse-chord-bridge
structure modern listeners have become accustomed to.

FOUR-HAND BAND

The secret to Welch and Rawlings’ success is more than their outstanding
songwriting. What makes the music so compelling are their performances,
live and on record, which feature Rawlings’ subtle and vital accompaniment,
played on a small-bodied old archtop whose thin sound is somehow perfect
for the setting. "I just move my capo around until I find something that
inspires me to do something," he said. "As soon as I get bored, I realize
that part doesn’t have to be there."

"Every guitar has a sweet spot," Welch interjected, "and every arrangement
has a place where it’ll work and a place where it won’t work."

But more than the key he chooses to play in, it’s Rawlings’ (literally)
offbeat sense of timing that grabs the audience. "I can’t really play straight
flatpicking," he explained. "It just doesn’t feel right to me. I drone
a lot, I keep stuff ringing a lot, but that’s mostly because there’s just
two of us. I sort of cross-pick, and that developed because it seemed to
line up with the strum that Gill does. It should sound like one calliope
sort of thing."

As an example, they played some of "One More Dollar," in which Welch’s
guitar part covers rhythm as well as a bass line that clearly stands out
from the rest of what she’s playing. "I think it’s helpful to have a playing
style like that when you’re just playing with two people," Rawlings said.
"It’s a lot harder to accompany somebody who plays real blocky, strummy
stuff. Gill stays off the middle two strings--the D and the G--and that
leaves room for me."

Rawlings keeps things interesting by frequently stepping outside the
chords. The results are somewhat jarring and very stirring. "I like to
play something inside the key at the same time I play something outside,"
he explained, "so it stays grounded. I try to play guitar like Bob Dylan
plays harmonica. He picks up the wrong harp and it’s beautiful, because
he’s got about three notes in there that are in the key and about five
that aren’t. It’s like a big rubber band stretching."

Welch’s banjo playing has opened up some new possibilities for Rawlings
as well. She tunes her banjo d D G C D (where the lowercase d is
the drone string, tuned in unison with the highest-pitched D in the other
strings). So she ends up playing only three notes, providing, in her words,
"very little harmonic information, but more of a continuous palette. I’ve
always got tonic stuff ringing, so in a way, we never leave the I chord."

Rawlings has no trouble building on this foundation. "I’m maybe adding
a note or two in once in a while," he explained. "It didn’t take long to
figure out which notes worked and which ones were sort of annoying."

IN THE STUDIO

After expending so much time and effort achieving their perfectly blended,
natural sound on stage, it would be a shame for Welch and Rawlings to go
into the studio and make your standard acoustic-duo-with-backup-band record.
Fortunately for us, they met producer T Bone Burnett before they even had
a record contract. Burnett helped them make Revival and Hell
among the Yearlings true to their musical vision.

The key to capturing the spirit of the songs is that they record everything
live, so that the vocals, guitars, and banjo all bleed into one another
in the mix. "All the stuff on the first record was mixed live to mono,"
Rawlings said. "When it was done, it was done. There’s no changing anything."

What Burnett had to offer were his ears and his opinions. "He’s a stupendous
judge of performance," Welch explained. "When we finished a take, he’d
say, ‘That was really close. Do another one right now." Or, ‘That was it.
Let’s listen back.’ He’s really dead-on with that stuff."

Putting the tracks together for both recordswas easy. According
to Welch, "They seemed to dictate themselves. Rawlings recalled that they
were sure about nine tracks on the new record and wrote the last one, "Only
One and Only," in the studio.

Welch and Rawlings have some "leftover tracks" kicking around as well
as some live performance tracks, which will probably appear on their next
record.

Excerpted from Acoustic Guitar magazine April 1999, No. 76.
The article also includes the music and lyrics to "Caleb Meyer."